By: Sandro Mairata
Aitana Sánchez-Gijón He had his first approach to the Lima cultural scene watching the play El monstruo de Armendáriz. It is also her first time in Peru, a personal debt that she has just paid off by filming Seamstressa film with fantastic touches that his co-star Mayella Lloclla defines as “similar to something out of Tim Burton, something that has not been done before in Peru”. The film is directed by Daniel Rodríguez Risco.
One of the great Spanish actresses, Sánchez-Gijón, is part of a golden generation of actors made up of Penélope Cruz, Antonio Banderas and Javier Bardem. Among his extensive film, theater and television career we can choose films such as A Walk in the Clouds (1995) with Keanu Reeves; The waitress from the Titanic (1997) by Bigas Luna; Get off the Moor (1988) together with Banderas and the late Verónica Forqué, or more recently, Almodóvar’s Madres paralelas (2021).
—How long did it take you to come to Peru?
—It’s just that I haven’t stopped working all these years; I have had children, family. Anyway, it was a dream; I have never had the time to take a pleasure trip, to get to know the country properly. And it is the first time that I have been offered to come to work at Peru.
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—And yet, you staged several plays with Mario Vargas Llosa there in Spain.
—There were four, and counting La Chunga, five.
—Are there more theater plans with Vargas Llosa?
-No no. I think Mario has already closed that chapter. I remember it as one of the richest and most exciting experiences of my life, both on a theatrical level, literary, like friendship, because it was almost ten years. It was he who told me: “You have to come to Peru, you are welcome whenever you want”.
—What is your character in The Seamstress about?
—Well, “Irene Dancourt” is the wife of General Dancourt, she is a woman who, when we meet her in history, has been campaigning for a few weeks to become president of the Association of Military Wives. It’s like her great ambition in life. She is a very ambitious woman, she has always been the wife of a military man, daughter of a military man, granddaughter of a military man. Actually, the protagonist is Mayella Lloclla and I am a bit the villain of this story, the antagonist.
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What motivated you to accept this role?
—Well, I really liked that it is a story that is told as a fable, that the entire aesthetic universe of this story comes to mind Amélie, or Alice in Wonderland comes to mind. Even the movie doesn’t even take place in Peru; In other words, it could be Peru, as it could be any other country in Latin America. It deals with a situation that has happened all my life here in Latin America, of course, in my country too: the difference in social classes, that, the world of perks, the escalation of the military, how the powerful always rule , who are the ones who risk their skin the least and send the humblest people.
—Did you already know the work of Mayella Lloclla? I understand that at the time of this interview, they have not yet met in person.
—It’s true, we haven’t seen each other yet, I’m going to meet her today (Monday). I have seen that she is a very prolific woman, but she also sings and dedicates herself a lot to music and that part is not me, I have not been gifted for that.
—In the eighties and nineties, Spanish cinema radiated anarchy, a lot of eroticism, a lot of transgression and self-confidence. Could those movies be made now?
—Well, probably now certain films would be judged very harshly. I think so, that it was a moment of freedom; We came from an iron and atrocious dictatorship, which led to a very evasive cinema, very revealing, with a very crude eroticism. In the seventies, already at the end of the Franco regime, there was a bit of a flood of cinema, as if out of a need to free oneself, and then, from the eighties onwards with Pedro Almodovar and so many other directors, that freedom was transformed into much more interesting cinema.
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